UHND.com - Notre Dame Football, Basketball, & Recruiting

Price is gone -- period. It makes no sense for him to return to college when he is presently considered the #2 RB in the draft and is unlikely for him to go any higher in the 2027 draft. With Love, the best RB in the country earning somewhere between $1.5 and $2.0M in NIL (and Price is simply not as good as Love so unlikely to get even that) and the contract value for the last pick in the 3rd round somewhere around $1.3M, the numbers don't add up to warrant the risk of injury as well as one more college year on his legs. It is not as if he has anything left to prove in college.

The key factor re: Williams I suspect is playing time. The staff is very high on both Young and James and Payne may be in the mix if he is healthy. Plus, ND is in on Spell, the #1 RB recruit and we have 2 RBs on the way in. All that makes for a very crowded RB room. Add to the fact that the RB coach who recruited him is gone. ND isn't going to pay a NIL premium for a RB who is only part of a rotation, and probably not RB1, so it is reasonable to assume that there might be other schools where he could be RB1 and get more NIL $ than ND might give. ND's NIL money has to be planned carefully (it is not a bottomless pit) and, with a deep RB room, Williams isn't going to warrant a large NIL payment from ND and another school might be able to give him more $$ and more playing time.

All that adds up to a significant possibility that Williams leaves which I would guess almost as likely as Minchey leaving.